Editorial: Treatment benefits society

Texas agencies everywhere have their hands out in the hopes of gathering up some of the money flowing out of the state's budget surplus. At least one request deserves special attention.

It comes from the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. MHMR wants the 1999 Legislature to approve about $158 million for treatments that include so-called "new generation" medications that it would use to treat certain brain-related diseases, such as schizophrenia.

State Sen. David Sibley, R-Waco, and state Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, wrote in a recent essay that schizophrenia is a "treatable brain disease" that, when treated effectively, can allow its sufferers to lead normal, productive lives.

According to Sibley and Gallego, these drugs "are responsible for dramatic success stories." They have helped take patients "out of costly hospitals, gotten them into rehabilitation programs and put them on track to function in the community," the lawmakers wrote.

Let's be clear about one thing: These new drugs are expensive. MHMR estimates they cost $2,000 to $5,000 per year for each patient. The rest of the money that MHMR seeks would go toward rehabilitation programs for those patients who are working themselves into society's mainstream.

But how does one quantify the benefit to someone who has been institutionalized, but who then could be free to work and to give something back to society? Moreover, it is no small benefit to the society that reaps the reward.

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain that society has treated as something to be feared. The medications under discussion at MHMR enable doctors to treat people's brains the same way they treat people's hearts and livers.

The payback to society - in fewer arrests of people suffering from these diseases and fewer people facing costly institutionalization - is incalculable.